- I love soup and this is an easy one to make if you have the proper ingredient in your pantry.

I use beans, white beans.

You can have black beans, you can have kidney beans, chicken stock, salt paper in it.

You blend it, blend it for a fewú second until it's really smooth.

Pour it in there and put chorizo in there.

Bring it to a boil, add a little bit of half and half or cream, stir it and you're ready to go.

Serve it on a beautiful plate like this.

Put on top chives.

Great fa soup.

I'm Jacques Pepin and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

I'm going to do a beautiful salmon in nori leaf with a shaved fennel salad.

One of my favorite.

A beautiful piece of salmon here.

What you do, you cut stripe like that to wrap into the nori leaf.

I would have a second one here, even a third one and the last one I will have to fold this or this, I usually keep it for gravlax or something else.

And what you do, you take those nori leaves, you can buy those all over.

And there is different size so it doesn't really matter the size that it is, but those are seaweed which actually are dried, you know?

So, you have to rehydrate them.

You can run them under water or just brush them with a little bit of water.

They have a beautiful color and they have actually a great taste.

So, my wife use them all the time, whether it's, this is your classic thing when you do sushi, you know?

So, what we put those in there this way, roll it and that basically it, you know, now we wanna cure it.

And the curing that I'm going to do here, I have a little bit of sugar, I put a bit of salt in it and there I use kosher salt.

I like the kosher salt for that because the segment of salt are larger and pointed and it puncture the salmon and draw out the moisture.

And this is what the curing process is.

And pepper.

So you have that mixture here.

So what you do, you put that you line your tray with plastic wrap, it has to be very flat, you know, because if it wavy then the salt go to to different place.

You want to have the equal amount of salt and seasoning all over.

And that's it.

Now you cut that into pieces, approximately three-quarter of an inch.

So, that's pretty easy to do.

And basically you put them on your salted tray here.

That's it.

A little bit of salt on top.

Same amount.

I mean salt, sugar, pepper, the mixture that we have here and that basically it, you know, you cover it and you want to cure that for at least an hour, but it can be done overnight.

And I have some which have cured here for a couple of hours.

So, they are ready.

With this, a fennel salad that you do with a whole bulb of fennel that which are beautiful.

Now, you can keep a couple of those fennel leaves like this to use as a decoration.

It's quite nice.

Or you use them in soup also.

But for the salad itself, basically you use the bulb and we're going to do that with so-called a mandolin, one of those slicing machine.

And you put them on top of it and it goes into very thin slice.

Now professional, most of the professional, never use a guard, but I would tell people to use a guard.

I mean I keep my hand very flat as you can see that.

But especially by the time it's about halfway down, you know, you put the guard on top of it or even you can put the guard all the way through.

There is little teeth in there so it goes right into it.

So you can continue this way through the end and getting through the end.

Have nothing left.

That's it.

Just that little piece here.

We can eat that piece.

This is a licorice taste, you know.

So, this is shaved very fine and that's what I want.

And this is going to be seasoned with fennel seed, salt, pepper, Tabasco, olive oil, and lemon.

That's already.

After an hour or so, you will notice that this gets slightly softer than it is now.

Thank you.

And it's fine.

I go right through my finger here.

Nice lemon juice.

Here we are.

And that can be tossed.

This one, this is the base of your nori, although you don't really have to put that underneath.

Should always look at recipe other than entertain itself if you want.

What I'm saying is that this is a recipe.

So nori is another recipe.

Very often you see a dish and there is maybe three, four recipe in it.

And you should extrapolate those recipe to be able to use them again in one way or the other.

In our case here, this is going to go directly in the bottom around nori.

It is nice and zesty, especially when your fennel bulb are young and tender.

I've also cut the fennel bulb this way and blanch them and then so them salted them with a bit of garlic and olive oil.

That's very good.

And here we are.

So, when you're ready to serve, these ones are now cured.

So you arrange them.

This is a very beautiful dish to do.

And you serve like two, two, three of those per person.

Maybe couple of those sprig here because they're so beautiful, you know, on top.

And I always finish with a little bit drizzling of a beautiful virgin olive oil around.

This is a salmon nori and shaved fennel.

And what I wanna do now is broil lamb chop.

I love lamb chop, especially very thick one.

Now, you don't find them at the market all the time.

So, if you can't find the very thick one then take smaller one and cut down on your cooking time.

As you can see those are quite lean.

Though they are what would be a tiny porterhouse steak if you want.

There is the T-bone here, the filet or tenderloin and the loin on the other side, it's part of the saddle that if the part on your back here, then it goes higher and you have the rib.

So that continue the rack, this is the saddle.

What I'm going to do here is to put some salt first on it on each side.

You don't salt your meat before you're ready to broil it because just like the fish, the salt will draw out the moisture and deprive the bacteria when necessarily being conditioned.

And that's how you cure when you cure meat or fish.

But if you don't cook it right away, you don't put the salt on it.

So I have cumin here, this is cayenne.

I have a bit of paper also and I'm going to put that on top, brush it with oil and I'm going to do something which make my wife very happy, is to cook it on a piece of aluminum foil so I don't mess up the tray.

A little bit of oil on top here and I put that on each side, the seasoning, drop it in the oil and turn it on the other side.

Again here.

Okay, here we are.

And now they're going to the broiler.

I put it quite close to the broiler, about three inches, yeah, three inches, about a minute, minute and a half on each side.

That's about two minute now.

And they are nice and brown.

So I turn them on the other side.

About the same amount of time.

Same amount of time on the other side or maybe slightly less, maybe a minute and a half.

(meat sizzling) I think they are cooked enough.

But what I want, I want the meat to rest a little bit.

See when a piece of meat is bouncing the way it bounce, it tells you more or less where it is.

And it's very important the resting of the meat.

When you have a raw piece of meat, it's mushy.

At the start cooking, the outside contract and it start getting hard and by contracting it squeeze the juice out of itself and that juice is pushed toward the center of the meat.

So, if you get a roast beef out of the oven, cut right through it, you'll notice that the outside is gray, like if it's undercooked, when actually it's squeezed out of juice and the center is flabby, lukewarm, raw-like.

If you left that roast beef standing for 20, 30 minutes or so, the meat decontract, the juice run through the meat and it's pink from the first slice to the last slice.

So, the resting is very important.

We are going to do here we are going to do a spinach, I have spinach here and with garlic and a lot of garlic, which I'm going to slice into thin slice.

You can use a vegetable peeler for that also.

It work quite well, but the knife works well too.

So, we put olive oil and in that olive oil we put the garlic, start browning the garlic there.

Then the spinach.

Have those beautiful tiny baby spinach.

It's going to be nice in it.

Now this is about brown enough for the garlic, I don't want it to burn.

So what I do, usually I put that directly on top of it.

You press it into the oil.

However, you don't want the garlic to burn underneath so you have to turn it.

What I do, usually I go with my hand.

This is cold anyway to get the garlic out.

If you're afraid you take it with this, it's perfectly fine.

Okay, here we go.

Now, with this salt, pepper, and we're going to do a garnish of pimiento there, red pepper, and dice.

This is a little bit of the Spanish in the family, huh?

So, I have the red paper and raisins.

This is a classic combination in Spain, raisin on top and red paper.

Nice color too.

It doesn't take that long to cook until it's wilted.

Especially nice, young baby spinach like this.

With this, however, piece of lamb.

I love baked potato, but baked potato takes a long time to cook.

My wife came out with a great recipe.

You have a big baked potato like that, it's like 10, 12 ounces, you know, she get into the house, put the oven at 425, I calculate that it takes about eight to 10 minutes before the oven get to 425.

During that time she put those potato in the microwave oven, seven, eight minutes about the same amount of time.

So, it's approximately cooked.

By the time it comes out, it's ready to go into the hot oven and cook there about 12, 15 minutes.

So you have a nice crusty outside, which you do what I want and a soft inside, great recipe, always learn from my wife.

And I have some here, which have been cooked.

So here they are.

Yep.

So, the classic mixture, chives in the sour cream.ú I like to put ground paper in it too.

Okay, now let's see whether this is, it's beautiful and it's cooked.

So, this is going to be served on the same plate.

Very often in our type of cuisine, the portion of meat is relatively small 'cause we put a lot of garnish, a lot of different vegetables that I put around with it.

Nice color.

Let's take a nice one here.

Well, this one looks good.

Even a little bit of that juice on top I could put, okay and then my potato this way, cut it this way and press it open.

You see the way it's cooked and smoking inside, you know, with sour cream on top and this is it.

What else?

With this you need a nice glass of red wine and the classic Bordeaux type mixture that you have.

I have a Malbec here, which is part of the wine using Bordeaux, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Malbec, and Petit Verdot are the five grape using the Bordeaux area.

This is 100% Malbec and it's a very deep wine.

Gonna be great with that.

(light music) I'm going to finish my meal today with crepe and I'll show you how easy it is to make crepe.

Large crepe, I put that pan on, I put a piece of butter in it and that butter won't even be melted by the time I finish my crepe batter.

Now what you want to do is to put about half of the milk in there, about half a cup of flour, a good half a cup, one egg.

Now put your top on, start your machine, then put the rest of your milk.

Splash of rum.

Salt.

Sugar.

And yeah, crepe batter should be very thin.

That type batter is thin.

It's almost a very, very light syrup.

The thinner it is, the finer the crepe are going to be.

Yeah, I can see that my butter is barely melted.

Claudine would sit at the table and wait for me until I made crepe.

So, those are large crepe, instead of doing a lot of crepe, smaller one, I used to do large one like this.

And you see the speed at which you spread out that crepe.

Don't worry if there is any hole in it, doesn't make any difference.

You can always patch it up.

But the speed at which I twist out or spread out the better rather will determine how thick it's going to be.

That is if your pan is really hot, as soon that batter touch the pan it coagulate.

If you spread it faster, it's thin.

So, it's important to spread it pretty fast.

And then we want to cook it enough like close to 40, 50 seconds to a minute so that you can get a nice crust on the other side.

So, we'll wait and there is a front way of turning it, you know, I turn it with the end of a fork like that.

You lift up the end, you grab the hand this way with your other finger and you twist it.

Well it's about fine.

Could be a little browner than that.

Usually the first one is for the dog or for me.

See this is not quite brown enough.

And of course you can flip it too, but for a large crepe like that, it's a little more difficult.

Let's flip it to see on the other side is fine too.

Okay, so those are very large crepe as you can see.

So one crepe like this is basically enough, we have one.

Another piece of butter.

So you know, sometime I put the butter or a bit of oil directly into the batter.

Then you don't have to butter your pan each time.

But the last time I was doing it with Julia, she says this is the wrong way to do it.

You have to put your butter in there.

So we have an argument about that and we did it her way and it was better than my way.

So, now I'm doing it this way too.

So I'm spreading this around a little more where I don't have any, okay.

And it makes a very elegant, very elegant this here, the crepe Suzette or something like this.

Now this is more cooked, here we are.

There is a nice one.

Now you will notice that that crepe, the first part of the crepe which brown is always the nicest one.

So, when you put it on your plate, you try to put the nice part underneath, not like I did here.

So that when you fold it, that shows.

Okay, time to fold that crap here again.

And that's how you make crepe and keep doing it.

Now you can freeze your crepe, but what the point, it didn't take me, you know, the time that it melt my butter and I still had to wait for the butter before I put the crepe batter in it.

So if I freeze it, it take me hours to defrost it, much faster this way.

So now with it we're going to do, you can serve it with sugar, with fruit, with berry, anything you want.

But in our recipe here, we're going to do a caramel and banana in it.

And the first thing that I'm going to do is to put half a cup, half a cup of sugar directly in the skillet and a little bit of water, just enough to moisten the sugar.

You stir it a little bit here, that the only time where you stir your sugar.

If you continue stirring your sugar all the time, it will usually make the sugar crystallized.

So this has cook about three, four minutes before we can put the banana in.

You can see that the edge is turning into a beautiful caramel.

If you wanna shake it at that point, you can shake it when it pass the level of crystallization.

And now I have a beautiful caramel color, you know.

So, you can put your banana in it, sliced banana, then you want to put lemon juice in it, a piece of butter.

Going to melt and a little bit of rum at the end.

And again, if you don't want to put the rum, it's fine, but I love the taste of the rum with banana, especially dark rum.

Pyrotechnic cooking.

When you put alcohol in anything like this, alcohol will evaporate in the form of vapor around 178 degree.

If the vapor goes out, it will ignite.

Actually a great deal of the calorie you have in the alcohol evaporate with the vapor.

So often we flambe, we flambe it on purpose.

So you know, you would want to serve it this way.

We have a large crepe here and that large crepe, I can fold it in half and then do a kind of a, you know, a type of cornucopia if you want with it to accommodate my, the banana and the caramel, you know?

Hm.

Put a little bit of your caramel around.

(light music) Here we are.

And then you wanna finish it with a bit of powdered sugar maybe.

This is a great classic dessert that you want to enjoy for friend.

I mean, I do this dessert at the house only when I have guests usually.

Otherwise I put too much weight.

(light music) I hope you enjoy the show and I enjoy making it for you.

Happy cooking.